Cool New Hardware Spectacular

It should come as no surprise the Hackaday tip line is regularly flooded with press releases. Everything from an infographic comparing Call of Duty 3 to Battlefield 3 (yes, totally serious), announcements that a company we’ve never heard of is getting a new CFO, to the business proposals from hat box manufacturers that wind up in our inbox on a nearly weekly basis.

With the Hackaday crew sifting though hundreds of these emails a month, you’d figure the PR people would hit gold once in a while, right? Apparently not. The coolest stuff we get in our email is usually from an engineer working on a project and doing a PR rep’s job for them. We thank them for that, so here’s two really cool pieces of hardware that showed up in the tip line recently.

Microcontollers and LCD displays, easily

Interfacing a color LCD with a microcontroller isn’t necessarily hard, but making it look good absolutely is. It’s a piece of cake to download an Arduino library for an LCD display and get a few lines of text up on the screen, but building a GUI? A fool’s errand, we say.

This is where FTDI’s new chip, EVE, comes in. It’s a single chip video engine designed for QVGA (320×240) and WQVGA (400×240) displays with a parallel RGB interface. From the diagrams up on FTDI’s site, getting a display running is as simple as connecting a microcontroller via an I2C or SPI interface, and then hooking up the video lines. There’s also support for touch screen interfaces and audio out, so if you’re looking to build a graphical home automation remote EVE might be the way to go.

x86 with GPIO

A few years ago, before the Raspberry Pi and the realization that low-power ARM boards were capable computing devices, your only choice when developing an embedded device with reasonably fast hardware were either Gumstix or a MiniITX board. Now ARM boards like the Beagleboard, Raspberry Pi, and others have taken over as the preferred platform, but there’s still a market for a small, capable x86 dev board.

[Matt] over at Intel sent us the low down on a project he’s working on called Minnowboard. Basically, it’s a 1GHz Intel Atom E640 processor with everything you would expect on an x86 motherboard – PCI Express, SATA, Gigabit Ethernet, USB, and HDMI through DVI. Unlike just about every other x86 board out there, the Minnowboard borrows ports from the embedded world, with I2C, SPI, CAN bus, and GPIO pins, LEDs, and switches.

[Edward Bernays] was the Antichrist

So there you go. Press releases that aren’t press releases, sent in to us by people who actually care about what they’re working on. While we’re on the subject of the crazy stuff that comes into our email, here’s a really good one that elicited a facepalm or two:

I realize there is a point to having boards like this, but, during some research I ran across pricing on Mini-itx boards. For the price of one of those and a secondary microcontroller, I could still save about $100. Where is the logic in one of these boards then?

EVE sounds a brilliant idea – I actually thought of trying to do something like this a while back. So, for example, you have a nice OLED display, but you just worry about commands like “Move to x,y and print text”, rather than the actual framebuffer and character generation.

As with the Raspberry Pi most likely the only interest I’d have in the minnowboard as a small dedicated personal computer foundation. In reading the minnowboards design goals in may retail at a price > $200 given the price of current motherboards that use the Atom, although I don’t have clue as to how much the features to make this a development board will add to the cost. Again just as with the Raspberry Pi, would have to consider if what it costs would be better spent towards purchasing a netbook from Walmart.

The retail price at Digikey was $189; I assume it was similar at the other retailers they listed. However, for me the real limitation is that it only has 1GB of RAM, which is nowhere near enough if I want to use the board as a general-purpose PC. (And if I don’t want a general-purpose PC with SATA and audio and everything, Raspberry Pi does just fine.)

Y’all, don’t forget about thin clients. If you want a cheap x86 board (some with fully-socketed RAM and CPU, with PATA headers and PCI slots), that’s the way to go. I have two that I bought on ebay for $15 or so each. For reference see my teardown of an HP model: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdLVBJMmnwg